1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to scripting in component software architectures and in particular to connecting to a scripting IDE for script creation and execution. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to providing a generic interface connecting to scripting IDEs to permit a user to select a preferred IDE for script creation and execution.
2. Description of the Related Art
Component software architectures and rapid application development (RAD) tools are increasingly proliferating. Component software architectures employ discrete software components to quickly prototype and flesh out interactive applications. Applications are built by combining a set of independent components with developer-written code which acts as a "glue" between components, usually responding directly to component events by setting component properties or invoking component methods. One currently popular component software architecture is the Java Bean specification of the Java programming language.
Developed by Sun Microsystems, the portability, security, and intrinsic distributed programming support features of the Java programming language make this language useful for Internet programming. Java is a totally object-oriented, platform independent programming language, which achieves architectural independence by compiling source code into its own intermediate representation. Java source code is not compiled into normal machine code, but is translated into code for a virtual machine specifically designed to support Java's features. A Java interpreter or a Javaenabled browser then executes the translated code. While Java source code must be compiled, no link step is required since the Java interpreter dynamically links the translated code at run time.
Java Beans is a component model for building and using Java-based software components. A "bean" is simply a Java class with extra descriptive information, similar to the concept of an OLE-type library. Unlike an OLE library, however, a bean is usually self-describing, including a file which contains the class's symbol information and method signatures and which may be scanned by a development tool to gather information about the bean, a process referred to as introspection. Any Java class with public methods may be considered a bean, but a bean typically has properties and events as well as methods.
In scripting components--writing executable scripts connecting various components--within a component software architecture such as Java beans, a scripting architecture is preferably provided which permits a user to plug in different scripting languages, each with or without their own integrated development environment (IDE) for script creation and execution. It would be desirable, therefore, to provide a standard interface for connecting a scripting IDE.